François Pinault Will Open a Private Museum in Paris

François Pinault, the founder of Kering, a French luxury goods holding company, will open a private museum in Paris. According to a release from Mairie de Paris, the Tadao Ando–redesigned space, which will be devoted to showing Pinault’s collection of contemporary art, is slated to open in late 2018.

Pinault will open the space in the Bourse de Commerce, a building near the French capital’s Les Halles market. As a recent New York Times article noted, Les Halles has always stuck out in Paris—its look is ultra-contemporary, and it’s often crowded and noisy. The news that the Pinault collection will have a home nearby is, as a release explains, part of an initiative to integrate Les Halles into the city’s cultural landscape.

This is not the first Paris museum that Pinault has planned. In 2005 Pinault canceled plans to build a museum on the outskirts of the city. Then, the following year, Pinault reopened Palazzo Grassi, a space in Venice previously owned by Gianni Agnelli, as a museum and had Ando redesign it. The Palazzo Grassi is now known for showing contemporary art on a regular basis, with solo exhibitions of work by Urs Fischer, Damien Hirst, and Olafur Eliasson, among others. Pinault also owns the Punta della Dogana and the Teatrino, both of which are in Venice.

Pinault has taken out a 50-year lease on the space in the Bourse de Commerce, in Paris’s 10th arrondissement. A release notes that Anne Hidalgo, the first deputy under the former Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoe, “enthusiastically welcomes this new venture, certain that the presence in Paris of one of the most important collections of contemporary art in the world will certainly contribute to the dynamism and international standing of the French capital.”